Merry Christmas!

I hope that each and every one of you, my readers, has a wonderful day.  Whether you’re celebrating with friends, family, or by yourself, may it be full of joy, fun, laughter, great presents and amazing food!

This gloriously festive stollen comes from the Christmas issue of BBC Good Food Magazine ‘08.  It was the cover recipe and looked so deliciously enticing that I just had to make it.

Unlike traditional stollen, this one incorporates jewel-like dried cranberries and jade-green pistachios.  It really is worth the bother of peeling loads of fiddly little nuts as they look so wonderful dotted through the crumb and scattered over the top of the finished stollen.  The cranberries also lend a slight sharpnes to the stollen which is quite refreshing and delicious, too.

It’s a welcome addition to any Christmas table and I’m sure that after one taste it’ll become a new family tradition.  Merry Christmas!

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New York, New York… are you there? Come in please. Over.

Is this thing on? *tap tap tap*

New York, I repeat. This is Bristol. Come in, please. Over.

Bristol, this is New York.  What is the problem? Over.

New York—what the hell is a bialy supposed to look like, over.

The usual problem with making something that you’ve only ever read about is, what on earth is the damn thing supposed to taste like?  In the case of the bialy, I knew that the crumb was supposed to be chewy like a bagel and I could easily imagine how delicious an onion and poppyseed filling would taste… but I kept reading all sorts of different descriptions of how they should look.  Google image search just confused me even more!  Still, I plunged on regardless.

Bialys have been on my to-bake list for what seems like forever.  They’re not something I’ve ever seen in the UK, and I was a proto-foodie when Dave and I visited New York years ago, so I couldn’t make the effort to track some down as I’d never heard of them!  If you haven’t heard of them, then let me (try to) enlighten you.  The bialy is the cousin of the bagel.  It’s the same dough, but instead of being shaped into a ring, boiled, then baked, the bialy is allowed to rise into a pillowy ball of dough and just before baking a hollow is made in the centre of the dough-ball, and filled with a teaspoon of either fried onions and poppy seeds or a caramelised onion mix.  Sounds good, right?

Believe me, they are every bit as delicious as they sound.  Why did I wait so long to make them??

Even better, bialys are really easy to make.  The dough, while a bit on the sticky side, is really straightforward to make.  If you have a Kitchen Aid (and haven’t lost your dough hook) then this is the perfect dough to make in it.  It is managable by hand—a dough scraper will help loads here—but if you hate sticky dough on your hands and automatically add flour, then toss it in the mixer and keep all that lovely moisture in the dough.

After the second rise, the dough is much easier to handle and it is really easy to create the dramatic crater that cradles the lovely onion and poppy seed filling.  I would really love to know whether the crater should have remained after baking or whether it is okay that it closed back up, trapping the filling.  This actually turned out to be quite handy when it came to toasting leftover bialys the next day.

I will definitely be making these beauties again.  After much dedicated munching, I have determined that I like them best lightly toasted and slathered with some good salted butter.  I think you would, too.

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I know, I know… when is she going to do some Christmas baking, right?

I’m getting to it, I promise.  I’ve just been having a hard time capturing the festive spirit this year, although I do have a very festive cold!!  In the meantime, if you’re really desperate for Christmas suggestions, you could do worse than make this gorgeous Pork, Apricot and Pistachio Terrine as a starter for your Christmas meal and if you’re a real glutton for punishment, this Pear Charlotte is an utterly amazing dessert.  With just five days to go to Christmas, you’re definitely too late to make a traditional fruit cake, but if you’re a chocolate-lover, a brandy-laced Chocolate Christmas Cake can even be made on Christmas Eve with perfect results.

But for the moment, I’m here to talk about Giorgio Locatelli’s classic focaccia recipe.  When I first saw this in Made In Italy I couldn’t believe my eyes; the recipe was so far away from what I understand to be a classical foccacia recipe.  So, on that basis I just had to try it.

A classic foccacia recipe in my book consists of a very wet dough which is best worked in a stand mixer to combat the sticky-wetness.  It is then slathered with extra-virgin olive oil before being left for a first rise.  Then the still very sticky dough is pressed into a large shallow tin and dimpled, doused in more oil, and scattered with rosemary and plenty of sea salt before going into a hot oven.

This… abomination… called for a very stiff dough, a few short rises, and then drowning the dough in an emulsion of salt, water and extra-virgin olive oil.  I really, really couldn’t see how it could work.

And yet, somehow it did.

I had to add more water to the initial dough as it just wasn’t coming together and there was loads of dry flour left in the bottom of the bowl.  And when I poured over the salamoia, it really did drown the dough and seeped its way underneath instead of resting nicely in the big dimples I’d created.  I fretted that the foccacia would boil rather than bake.  But when all was said and done, and I pulled the tray from the oven, I had foccacia.

It looked, smelt and tasted like foccacia, with an airy and bubbly crumb, which had a nice chew-factor to it.  And it all disappeared within 24 hours, which should tell you how good it was.

So, I guess I owe Giorgio an apology for calling this incredible foccacia an abomination and for being so sceptical.  If you’re still feeling a bit sceptical about this recipe, then do give it a try yourself.  And if you like to have a bread basket out on the table at Christmas, then I’d be willing to bet that it’ll be emptied pretty damn fast if you fill it with squares of this foccacia!

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Tuscan rosemary, raisin and olive oil bread

Pan di Ramerino is a Tuscan bread flavoured with rosemary (ramerino means rosemary in Italian), raisins and olive oil.  Originally it was a Florentine Easter tradition; street vendors would sell the large, fragrant buns as the congregations came out of church on the Thursday of Holy Week (Maundy Thursday in the UK).  Nowadays it can still be bought at Easter, but it is easily bought in bakers throughout the year as it is too delicious to keep for just one day a year!

On Friday morning I was up at the crack of dawn–in fact, I was up before dawn–as I had to let in the guy who was putting up our new fence in the back garden.  In a somewhat sleep-deprived haze, I decided that then would be the perfect time to bake.  While flicking through Culinaria Italy the other day I had spotted the Pan di Ramerino amidst a large array of Italian breads and the sweet and savoury nature of it intreigued me.  I’ve seen a few baking recipes that use rosemary, but I’ve never actually tried one out.

Alas, there was no recipe in Culinaria for the rosemary bread so I had to improvise somewhat.  I did take a quick peek at Ada Boni’s Italian Regional Cookery to confirm that it was just a plain white dough that I needed to make and then went boldly forward.

I used a scaled back version of my Farmhouse Bread dough, but removed the butter as plenty of extra-virgin olive oil would be worked in later.  In my sleep-deprived state, I forgot that the rosemary-infused oil would need time to cool down, so the dough was almost fully risen when I set out the pan to cool.  Whoops.  Don’t do as I do, do as I say and make the infused oil as soon as you’ve set the dough to rise.  You should probably avoid snoozing on the sofa between rises, too, unless your kitchen timer is aggravatingly loud.

Incorporating the oil into the dough was hard and messy work.  The dough rebelled against the large amount of oil and the dough turned very sticky and gloopy.  I found that the best thing to do was to trickle a little oil onto the dough, smooth it over the surface and then start to knead.  Rather like giving someone a massage, really.  By contrast, working in the sugar, salt and raisins was much easier.  I did have to sprinkle some extra flour over the dough as it was still a bit too sticky to shape.  All of a sudden the dough came together into a nice, plump, glorious ball and I quickly shaped it into eight balls.  A short rise, for which I managed to stay awake, and then into the oven.

The rosemary flavour was on the faint side in this batch of bread, so next time round I would chop some of the rosemary finely before infusing into the oil for a more pronounced flavour.  The aroma was great, though, and by the time the bread was cooling on a rack the whole house was beautifully perfumed.

I would definitely make pan di ramerino again.  The crumb of each bun was deliciously soft, slightly peppery from the good olive oil, beautifully fragranced with rosemary and subtly sweet.  With each bite the sweetness and the rosemary flavour (and aroma) built up on the palate.  The buns are actually pretty satisfying; I had one for lunch and didn’t feel the slightest hunger pangs until late afternoon.

Interestingly, before I mentioned the Easter connection to Dave, he commented that it tasted a bit like a Hot Cross Bun, and yes, they’re very similar actually.  Both have a sweet bread dough, dried fruit and a cross on top.  I love these little coincidences… I wonder which bread came first?

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This month, The Daring Bakers are making our own kind of history.  For the first time, the monthly challenge is hosted two ‘alternative’ Daring Bakers, Shel and Natalie.  The challenge was to make Lavash Crackers from Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice plus a vegan and gluten-free dip.  Fantastic!  I’ve been wondering when our next savoury challenge would come and yay!  Here it is!

So what is lavash?  Lavash is an Armenian flatbread that is pretty versatile.  Straight from the oven it is soft and pliable, but upon cooling it hardens to a cracker texture.  I’d never heard of this bread before the challenge was announced, despite owning The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.  I guess I must have skipped over the page whilst flicking through my own copy of the BBA but now that I’ve been introduced to them I’m quite enamoured.

The dough was very quick to mix, with a nice smooth texture from the oil.  Perhaps I added too much water, but my dough didn’t double in size, despite leaving it for almost two hours at room temperature (21.5C according to our fantastic new digital thermostat) but as it had risen a bit, I figured that I could just go ahead and roll it out as I did want very thin crackers.

To make life easier on myself, I rolled the dough out directly on a teflon sheet and then wiggled a baking sheet underneath the whole affair.  It took maybe about 15 minutes to get the dough as thin and even as possible.

I really liked the spice and seed combination shown in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice so I decided to go with that and proceeded to sprinkle and strew the sheet of dough with the most amazing array of earthy colours and textures.  As I was worried about the seeds and spice falling off after the crackers had baked, I prodded them down into the dough.  Oh, I did make one small change.  I used smoked Maldon salt to give it a bit of a kick.

As they baked, a spicy-sweet aroma drifted out from the kitchen.  I tried not to hover over the oven, but as usual I found myself standing there watching the crackers bake.  I guess I shouldn’t laugh at Lucas watching the washing machine going round and round and round if I can stand in front of the oven and watch bread baking with equal levels of fascination…

The crackers came out wonderfully thin and crispy with all the toppings firmly stuck in place.  Hurrah!  As I’d opted to pre-cut the crackers, all I had to do was snap off as many as I wanted and taste away.

I originally planned to serve the lavash with some pea guacamole, the idea being that the sweetness of the peas would contrast nicely with the earthiness of the spices.  But… when it came down to it, I realised that not only had I forgotten to thaw the peas, I’d used up my limes and salsa earlier on in the week.  There was no way that I was going out to the supermarket on the busiest night of the week, so I hit the pantry for inspiration.

After tossing back and forth a few options, I settled on making a chickpea and pomegranate molasses dip.  I guess this is really just a bit of a twist on hummus, but who cares?  It was very easy and very delicious with a gorgeous balance between the sweet and sour molasses and the creamy chickpeas.  I loved how the pomegranate was the first and last thing you tasted in the dip, effortlessly sliding from achingly sour to a wonderfully sweet aftertaste which combined perfectly with the spices.

The lavash were an absolute breeze to make and great fun, too.  I’m really proud of how thin I managed to get them, but there’s still room for improvement.  Next time I’ll run the dough through my pasta machine for the ultimate in thinness.  These would be great, broken into artistic shards and served with a rainbow of dips, at a drinks party if I ever were to host such a thing.  Less glamorously, but equally as delicious, they make a great afternoon snack with just about any dip or extra topping–gluttonous?  Moi?–you can think of.

Check out The Daring Bakers Blogroll to see everyone else’s lovely lavash and dips!  Thanks for an awesome challenge, Natalie and Shel!

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Before I tell you all about this beautiful bread… check out the all-new look that A Spoonful of Sugar has!  After almost five years of blogging I felt it was about time I splashed out on a professional designer.  So, huge thanks to Teresa from Delicious Design Studio for my gorgeous new look.  What do you guys think?

Also, if you happened to be in Scotland this morning, and if you also happened to be listening to BBC Radio Scotland, then you probably heard me talking to Fred MacAulay & Co about cookbooks.  A big ‘Hello!’ to any listeners who’ve dropped in for a visit.

And so to the bread…

My Italianophile tendencies don’t just encompass present-day Italy. Oh, no… I’ve been entranced by Italy ever since we learned about the Roman Empire at school. For years I used to love trotting out Roman trivia–did you know that the Romans developed and named the concept of camber on roads?

Recently Dave treated me to a copy of Roman Cooking by Mark Grant. This book, although one of my newest, is also in a sense my oldest. It aims to recreate ancient Roman recipes for the modern cook from the rather vague or fragmented recipes that have survived the ages. It makes for fascinating and mouthwatering reading. We’d always been told at school that ancient Romans had decadent–and drunken–feasts, but the actual details of the food were somewhat glossed over. Twenty years later, this book has done a great job of filling in the gaps for me!

The book’s introduction does a great job of introducing Roman Empire cusine to the reader and of comparing it to the cusines of the rest of the Ancient World at that point in time.  It rather shattered my ideas of constant banquets for everyone, and I suddenly recalled that the class system was very much in evidence at that time.  The recipes in Roman Cookery are everyday, common people recipes and it’s quite reassuring to see how well they ate.

The book is divided into familiar chapters: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner at the Bar and Dinner in the Dining Room which reminded me that the ancient Romans were real people.    Breakfast seemed to be porridge of various types, but there was also a rose honey to sweeten things up which intrigued me.  There is a huge variety of breads on offer in the Lunch chapter and also some unusual fried pasta sheets which are a precursor to the lasagne we know today.  There’s plenty of vegetarian recipes, and indeed this might be a great book for a jaded vegetarian, as meat and fish were highly expensive.  Of the meat recipes included, I’m particularly keen on trying the Pork in a sweet wine and fig sauce which sounds incredibly good.  There’s oodles of historical information in the chapter introductions and recipe headers which held my attention nicely, but your mileage may vary on this.

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I just can’t think of a good name for this bread. Swirly bread? Savoury swirl bread? No, I think two-tone Italian bread just about covers things.

The two-tones in question are tomato and basil and cheese and ham, making this loaf perfect for cheese or ham sandwiches. Even better… cheese and ham sandwiches!

This is an easy adaptation of my Farmhouse White Bread, which is such an easy and friendly dough to work with. I wanted to make something a little different when we had some friends over for lunch, and since I had an abundance of fresh basil I decided to work that into the dough along with some other classical Italian flavours: tomato, Parmesan cheese and Parma ham.

You don’t need to run out and buy Parma ham especially for this recipe. Proscuttio will work just as nicely and I’m sure that almost any kind of ham would work. I just happened to have a couple of slices of the good stuff left over from another recipe, so used them up rather than let them dry out and go to waste.

As you’d imagine, all the flavours work together really well, making this a nicely balanced savoury loaf that can stand on its own as some seriously good toast or go onto make amazing sandwiches. If you happened to have any leftovers, then you could make a great savoury bread and butter pudding with them.

And as a nice additional bonus, for kids of all ages, you get the excitement of seeing different shapes in each slice you cut!

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Riddle me this… what recipe sprawls over ten pages and takes seven hours to complete?

Julia Child’s French Bread, of course!

Julia Child evokes warm, fuzzy feelings in the hearts of many Americans, however on this side of the pond she’s hardly a household name. So I headed over to Wikipedia–I know, I know… hardly an accurate source, but it’s a good starting point–for some background, and was amazed to discover that she worked in US Intelligence during WWII. Very cool.

It was also quite inspiring to read that she only started cooking seriously in her 40s. That should give hope to career changers or even the most inexperienced and nervous cooks, presuming they want to improve, of course!

Julia’s French Bread clocks in at an impressive ten pages as already mentioned. It’s not just a recipe, though. It’s more of a treatise on the art of French bread-making as it stood in the fifties.

The best bread is often the simplest, and you can’t get much more simple than Julia’s ingredients: flour, salt, yeast and water. One of the requirements for this month’s challenge was that we use all-purpose flour to get as close as possible to the 8% gluten that French bakers use. I’ve got to admit, this hurt. I hate using all-purpose/plain flour for bread baking. It always produces a weak, flabby dough and in any case, the brand that I use is 11% protein and my standard bread flour (Dove’s) is 12.8%. I really, really wanted to pull out the bread flour but decided that I should be a proper Daring Baker and put aside my prejudices.

Despite–or perhaps because of–the length of the recipe, it went pretty well. Certainly much better than last month’s disastrous Lemon Meringue Pie.

My crust wasn’t terrifically hard–no nice shattering noises when I tore into the loaf, alas–but it was very tasty indeed. I did manage to get some decent-sized holes in the crumb which worked perfectly for holding butter. The flavour was good, but as I’ve never had real French bread I don’t have anything to compare it to. I can say, however, that it was a decent loaf of bread. I’ve baked far better in the past and I’m sure I will in the future, but I’m glad that I gave this recipe a whirl!

The best thing about this recipe was that it gave me the perfect opportunity to christen my shiny new dough scraper and lame, bought in a (slightly) enthusiastic splurge after my cookery course last weekend. I’ve always wanted a lame and I have to say that the proper tool makes a massive difference. Normally even my sharpest knife drags and deflates the dough, but the lame glided through without snagging. And the dough scraper was awesome! Very good for mixing and also the initial very sticky stage of the kneading. I’ve actually been using it every day when chopping vegetables as it’s a nice safe way of transferring them from board to pot or container. Better for your knife, too, I suspect.

Next time round I think I will swap to bread flour and perhaps reduce the amount of yeast as my dough rose twice as fast as the recipe dictated, despite my efforts to find the coldest spot in the house. I think that proving the dough on the final baking sheet would also be an improvement–I lost a lot of air in the painstaking transfer between cloth, intermediate and baking sheet. As the crust wasn’t terribly golden or very hard–but still tasty!–I would increase the oven temperature to maximum for the first 10 minutes of baking, and then drop it back down.

For the full recipe (and helpful pictures), visit Breadchick Mary’s website.

It is possible that I am the cruellest woman in the world. At the very least, I’m definitely the cruellest woman in our house, admittedly this is an easy crown to claim as I’m the only woman in our house. Still, at least this new title gies me the opportunity to wear my wedding tiara again!

Let me explain…

Last week, Dave had a tooth extracted—all offers of tea and sympathy will be gratefully accepted, I’m sure—and one of the strict instructions that his dentist gave him was to not eat any hard or sharp foods for several days.

Guess who made lots of deliciously crunchy bread? Oops.

While Dave was being tortured with a pair of pliers (or whatever they use these days) Lucas and I went shopping. In the back of a discount bookshop I discovered two books that I’d had in my Amazon Wishlist for a while: Dough by Richard Bertinet and Gorgeous Cakes by Annie Bell. Both for about 33% of their RRP! I hugged them to my chest and squeaked with glee while Lucas made his “Mummy’s gone mad face.”

The USP (Unique Selling Point) of Dough is the bread-making DVD enclosed with each copy, which in the space of 20 minutes can take you from a complete novice to… well… slightly less of a novice baker. The best thing about the DVD is that it demonstrates Bertinet’s method of “working the dough”.

Bertinet doesn’t knead dough, or indeed, knock it back. He favours a gentler method and also adds minimal flour to the dough when working it. His rationale is that the role of the flour in the recipe is to absorb the water, which it will do if given enough time. Adding extra flour makes for easy, non-sticky kneading, but inevitably results in a heavy loaf with a tight crumb. It’s hard to describe in words how he handles the dough, but there is lots of folding to trap air, along with some gentle stretching of the dough to develop the gluten.

My curiosity was piqued by the description and video of this method, so bright and early the next morning I started making dough. (I’ll also admit to being seduced by the gorgeous fougasse on the cover of the book. The photography throughout the book is just as beautiful, which is another good reason to pick up a copy.)

My dough was very wet and porridgy, so I was sceptical that the dough would ever firm up and stop sticking to me, my cuffs—don’t wear a long-sleeved top!–and the worktop, but miraculously it did. The stretch-slap-fold thing is a bit weird initially, but after a few minutes I fell into a rhythm. I didn’t manage to get the dough to a completely un-sticky stage, but the dough was pulling away from the worktop and felt smooth and bubbly, so I figured it was time to let it rise.

Just before I set the dough to rise, I worked in some roasted onions. (Couple of onions sliced paper thin, salt, pepper, dried thyme, touch of olive oil and roasted in a hot oven for about 10 minutes until browned and soft. Makes a nice crunchy snack, too.)

The fougasse were fantastic! Despite having a much shorter fermenting time than the recipes that I’m used to, they developed a great flavour, helped along loads by the roasted onion strips I suspect. The open shape of the bread ensured maximum crunch per bite and the crumb was light with nice even holes. The roasted onions added extra bursts of flavour and crunch where they’d peeked out from the dough during baking and gone Extra Crispy. Yum.

Our junior foodie gave the onion fougasse a big thumbs up. He’s happily chewing away on a strip of it just now, with the occasional dip into the gravy from his lunch. Excuse the messy face—it’s the sign of a great lunch, I’m told. He’s also just had his first taste of Norwegian Brown Cheese which he seemed to approve of. He’s developing expensive tastes, I’m afraid!

I think I might have to make some more fougasse for our Boxing Day Extravaganza. (In recent years we’ve taken to cooking up a feast for ourselves and a couple of friends on Boxing Day as I love doing the whole Christmas Dinner thing, but we traditionally spend Christmas Day with Dave’s family so I get the day off from the kitchen. The—somewhat gluttonous—solution was to have two Christmas meals.) Bertinet notes that you can part-bake then freeze the breads, which is perfect for the lazy cook who wants to do as much as possible in advance.

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Way back at IMBB 6: Grillers and Barbecuers Delight, I admired Deb’s Char Siew Bao. Over a year later I’ve finally managed to get round to making some of my own, my only problem was that I’ve never actually tasted the real thing…. So, I’m unable to tell you all if these are as good as the real thing.

I opted to go the whole nine yards and make my own Char Siew–exactly how many spellings are there for this? I think I ran across at least four–as we’ve recently moved house, and I haven’t managed to scope out a good Chinese takeaway yet. It was definitely worth the effort but to minimise the time I spend hanging around the oven in the future, I think I’d make a couple of kilos of Char Siew at a time. As much as I love cooking, I resent having to spent an hour chained to the oven basting religiously. Far better to do it in one large batch.

My bun dough recipe is adapted from several recipes found on the internet. A lot of people complained that their dough turned out dry, so I opted to use full-fat milk and real butter to add moisture. It worked beautifully. The crumb was fine, fluffy and deliciously moist. The amount of sugar used in the dough is quite frightening, especially for what is supposed to be a savoury snack, but I promise you the whole thing works.

All in all, I’m really proud of these bao. I have no idea how they match up to the real thing, but I know that they’re incredibly addictive. I’m having real difficulty stopping myself from gobbling up the last two–I’ve even come up with all sorts of plausible excuses to give to Dave, as I promised to save them for him! The sweet, fluffy dough is a perfect compliment to the intense sweet, salty, savoury of the pork filling. Every bite is a delight and as soon as the last crumb is gone, you’ll be plotting another batch.

I wish I could eat bao every day….

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